Erin Proctor Collins

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Wide Drover. Craft: Quiet Confrontation.

Erin Proctor Collins was born in 1992 at Birmingham, Alabama, and is living today in Birmingham, where she works as a nurse and, since 2025, as a vampire slayer of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger. The family book knows her as The Wide Drover, a name for the cattleman who moves a great herd across open country by standing in the right place and saying very little, and it classes her as a Broker, a hunter who works by dealing, by terms and by go-betweens, who would sooner settle a matter across a table than in a street, and who gets a creature to agree to the place where it will be stopped. Her craft is Quiet Confrontation, the art of telling a creature in a calm voice and a public place that it has been seen, and her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She was called in 2025, in a boarding house, when a lodger paid in coins older than the building. She is the younger child of the postal clerk Michael Collins and of the seamstress and slayer Renee Foster Proctor, The Grey Latch, who was her mentor, and the sister of the slayer Gary Collins Proctor. She has not married and has no children. She was born in Birmingham, though her parents lived in Jackson, because her mother had gone to her grandmother. Renee, who was twenty-two and expecting in the first week of October, had driven over in September to help in the sewing room on the hill, where Wilma Proctor, who was sixty-six and had been a vampire slayer for nearly fifty years, had broken her wrist and could not pin a hem. The baby was a fortnight early. She arrived at three in the morning in the back bedroom of the old house, with the sewing machine still going downstairs on the strength of a neighbour's foot, and a midwife of the old school, who had delivered half of the street, laid her on the cutting table for a moment on the way to the bed and said that she had never seen anything as long. Wilma, with the cast on her arm, looked at the child over her spectacles for the whole of a minute and said that she would do. It was, in the family's recollection, the highest mark that Wilma ever gave to anyone on first inspection, and she repeated it, in the same words, to the mayor. She was a long, solemn, brown-haired, steady-eyed child who was taken home to Jackson in a hat box and who, at four, was observed standing quite still in the doorway of the post office staff room watching a row of mail clerks as a heron watches water. She could name the houses of an entire district at eleven. She said very little at school, where she was thought shy, and a great deal at home, where it was understood that when Erin said that something was not right in the Hendersons' yard it was worth looking at. Her mother taught her as she had taught her brother, over supper, with the names of streets, but it was her father who taught her the thing that made her a Broker. Michael Collins, who spent forty years at a window explaining to the public what it could and could not post, held that a person can say nearly anything to anybody in a queue, provided that the voice is level and the line is behind them. He said that nobody ever started a fight at a counter. She took it to heart. She trained as a nurse because it was the work that she wanted, and for no other reason, at the university nursing school in Birmingham, and she took a degree in 2014 at twenty-two and a post on a medical floor in a large hospital on the Southside. It was an education in the thing that her father had been right about. A ward is a place in which people say the unsayable in a level voice. She learned to tell a family at three in the morning, in a corridor, in front of the vending machine, that the patient would not see the dawn. She learned to deal with a surgeon, a pharmacist, an insurer and a priest in a single hour, and to see that each of them went away feeling that he had won. She learned that the whole of nursing is a series of trades, a little less of this against a little more of that, and that the skill is to stand between two people who both believe they are right and to arrange for neither to be wrong in front of the other. By thirty she was the charge nurse on nights, a tall, calm woman with a long plait and a clipboard, whose floor, the residents said, was the only one in the building where the visitors left when they were asked. She had known all her life that she would be called, and had waited, with the patience of a child who has been told that a present is coming, for twelve years after her brother. It came in the third week of September 2025. She had taken on, on her days off, a few patients for a home-health agency, as many nurses do, and one of them was a widow named Mrs Pruitt, aged ninety, who kept a boarding house of eight rooms in a tall, thin, brown-shingled building in a street at Ensley, built in 1923 for steelworkers, and who was mending slowly from a broken hip. On a Thursday afternoon, while Erin was changing the dressing in the downstairs room, the lodger from the second floor came down to pay the week's rent. He was a pleasant, thin, formal man with a hat, who had lived in room six since the spring. He laid the money on the hall table in a row. It was in silver, a handful of coins that had gone dark with handling, and she saw, over Mrs Pruitt's shoulder, that the nearest was a half-dime of 1853, and that the next was a Seated Liberty dollar of 1859, and that not one of them was newer than the Civil War. The building, which had been put up in 1923, was seventy years younger than the coins. They were not worn. They were new. She did not say a word. She finished the dressing, said good afternoon, and walked out into the street, and sat in her car for twenty minutes with her hands on the wheel. Then she rang her mother. Renee, who had been listening with her pins in her mouth, asked her to describe the way the man had held his hat. She asked three questions, none about the coins. Then she said that it was time, that Erin had been seeing things for a decade and that this was the first that had walked into a house on its own feet. She drove over on the Saturday, four hours on the interstate with the Ledger in her head, and for the whole of a week she taught her daughter, in the front room of Mrs Pruitt's boarding house, in the evenings, over tea, what a Broker was. It was a matter of terms. The thing in room six did not wish to be fought. It wished to go on being a lodger, as it had been for a hundred and sixty years in a hundred and sixty houses, and the whole business of a Broker was to find out, in a calm voice, what it wanted, and to give it one thing, which was a time and a place to leave. She took the matter up on a Sunday morning, in the one room in the building that had other people in it, the dining room, at the long table during the lodgers' breakfast. She sat down opposite him with a cup of tea and said in her ward voice, quite pleasantly, that she had seen the coins. She said that she knew whose they were. She said that she knew how long he had been in the district and that she would be glad of a word with him, in public, on a matter of terms. The lodgers went on eating. The creature, who had been looked at, in his hundred and sixty years, by a good many people with a crucifix and none at all with a form, put down his fork. They talked for forty minutes about a series of small things, the lease, the rent, the debt that he had incurred, the date of the end of it and the place where he would be at that hour, and when she got up she said that the matter was agreed. On the Thursday evening, in an empty rail yard, at the hour that she had named, Gary and she shut it in. It went without a word. Her brother said that it was the quietest night he had ever worked. She is thirty-four now, a long-boned, composed woman with a plait and her mother's way of looking at a hem, and she lives in a flat in the south of the city, with a cat and a shelf of notebooks in which she writes down the terms, in two columns, headed what he wanted and what I gave. She is a charge nurse by day and a Broker by arrangement. She has closed three matters in thirteen months. Mrs Pruitt, who is ninety-one, is reported to be on her feet and says that room six has been let to a student. Erin Proctor Collins is remembered in the Proctor family as The Wide Drover, the nurse who sat down opposite a creature at breakfast and agreed the terms of its going. In the Slayerverse she stands for the Brokers of the White Ledger, the hunters who won by dealing, and who showed that a level voice, a public room and a well-drawn bargain can move a very old thing out of a town as quietly as a herd across open ground.